Priorities and Goals Worksheets

ProjectConnections.com TemplatePriorities, Goals, and Actions Alignment Worksheet

Contributed by Kimberly Wiefling, Wiefling Consulting

INTRODUCTION: Priorities, Goals, and Actions Alignment Worksheet
(The Template Starts on the Following Page)
What This Is
Worksheets for personal use to capture critical goals; make sure your goals are prioritized so that your energy goes to what’s most important; and develop personal action plans that align where you spend your time with what you identified as most important.
We’ve filled in a few worksheet cells to show how the content could play out for a Project Manager’s particular career development goal.
Why It’s Useful
Because we’re all too busy with too many competing demands on our time. If you step back and look at how you’ve spent your last 2 weeks, can you say for sure that your energy was spent on really important items—at home or t work?
This format was created originally as a personal tool—simple in concept and format but powerful if used consistently—to help make sure that question always gets answered with a “Yes.” The worksheets provide a means for keeping prioritized goals in front of us and driving our actions.
How to Use It
Identify Prioritized Goals: Use the Priorities Worksheet to list current goals, challenges, issues, areas of concern, or opportunities, in order of decreasing priority to you. These can be personal goals, work goals, career goals, or a mix. Priority can be thought of as a combination of importance and urgency. To decide which are your top priorities, first list all of them and then decide where you want to focus most of your energy. Then choose where you would next focus if #1 were on track.
For each priority area, fill out the following:

Goal, Stated as a Desired Outcome. Be Specific! What is it that you want to achieve?
Measure: What would be the observable signs of success? Get very concrete about how you will know you’ve reached the goal.
Date: By when do you intend to accomplish this? Give yourself a time goal to ensure action.
What, if anything, seems impossible about this? Acknowledge the fears, risks, or barriers to achieving your goal. Then you can plan steps to overcome those obstacles.
What outcome would exceed your expectations, and surprise and delight you? The biggest goals often yield the strongest motivation and action! Dream big and capture it to help drive bold enough action planning.

Generate Ideas and Plans:Use the Ideas and Plans Worksheet to brainstorm a list of 12 or more ideas or actions for each goal. Choose 1 to take action on for each goal. NOTE: Include wild and "impossible" ideas! Make sure your list includes at least one idea that would never work and another that you consider ridiculous; this way you can be certain you are not self-censoring your brainstorming.
Act on the ideas, record progress, and assess your path: Sit down periodically (at least every other week) to review your Ideas and Plans Worksheets and note your status through the task list. If you find yourself not making progress, ask yourself what’s in the way. Have you set the wrong priorities? Are your goals not compelling enough to lead you to act consistently? Adjust your priorities, goals, and actions as needed.
Develop the habit of keeping yourself focused on what’s most important!

The Template Starts on the Following Page

Used by Permission on ProjectConnections.com. Permission for Members' use on their projects.

See our Terms of Service for information on PMO/group use and corporate subscriptions.

ProjectConnections.com TemplatePriorities, Goals, and Actions Alignment Worksheet

Contributed by Kimberly Wiefling, Wiefling Consulting

Template: Priorities, Goals, and Actions Alignment Worksheets

What Timeframe Does This Cover?  Week  Month  3 Months  6 Months  Year  Several Years

Priorities - List current goals, challenges, issues, areas of concern or opportunities in order of decreasing priority to you.

NOTE: Priority can be thought of as a combination of importance and urgency. To decide which are your top priorities, first list all of them and then decide where you want to focus most of your energy. Then choose where you would focus next if #1 were on track.

Priority / Goal, Stated as a Desired Outcome
Be Specific! / Measure: What would be the observable signs of success? / Date: when do you intend for this to be accomplished? / What, if anything, seems impossible about this? / What outcome would exceed your expectations, and surprise and delight you?
#1 / Be seen as a business-savvy project manager who is capable of guiding front-end of critical projects. / Having my boss (Director) see me as able to speak for him in the business-requirements meetings at start of each project. / October 2006 / I have trouble speaking up strongly when contentious trade-offs are being discussed.
I don’t know how to learn the biz well enough to feel comfortable making big judgment calls / Being given a large release to manage next year.
#2
#3

See next page for Worksheet for brainstorming ideas and actions for reaching the above goals.

Ideas and Plans Worksheets – Brainstorming

Brainstorm a list of 12 or more ideas or actions for each goal. Choose 1 to take action on for each goal!

NOTE: Include wild and "impossible" ideas! Make sure your list includes at least one idea that would never work and another that you consider ridiculous.

GOAL #1 – Description: Be seen as a business-savvy project manager who is capable of guiding the front-end of critical projects.

Idea or Action / Owner / Due Date / Status
1 / Request lunch with John – he is seen as superstar in terms of business-savvy. Find out how he learned it all and what makes him comfortable challenging VPs in public. / Me / April 15
2 / Request meeting with my boss to lay out my development plan – what must he see before he’d let me speak at the biz requirements meetings? / Me – ask Tom R. / April 20
3 / Talk to head architect – would he give me some tutorials on how the business priorities and architecture decisions interact? / Me / May 31
4 / Ask to sit in on Business Team discussions for Release X to see what kinds of tradeoffs they discuss for that large release. / Me / May 31
5 / Find a class on business requirements analysis for large interconnected programs. / Me / June 15
6 / Figure out how I can get some assertiveness coaching. / Me / June 30
7 / Identify how I can participate in business discussions, tradeoff analysis, decisions on the projects I’m assigned to. / Me / April 30
8 / “Ask for the Job 1” - have interim review meeting with my boss – has he seen progress, what areas need work, am I ready to handle the requirements meetings? / Me / August 1
9 / “Ask for the Job 2” - request meeting with my boss to ask him to support me in getting an assignment related to big release management next year. / Me / Ask by Sept 30
Meeting by Oct 31
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GOAL #2 - Description

Idea or Action / Owner / Due Date / Status
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GOAL #3 - Description

Idea or Action / Owner / Due Date / Status
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See our Terms of Service for information on PMO/group use and corporate subscriptions.

ProjectConnections.com TemplatePriorities, Goals, and Actions Alignment Worksheet

Contributed by Kimberly Wiefling, Wiefling Consulting

About the Author

Kimberly Wiefling is the author of one of the top 100 project management books in the US, “Scrappy Project Management: The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces”, and the founder of Wiefling Consulting, LLC, a scrappy global consulting enterprise committed to enabling her clients to achieve highly unlikely or darn near impossible results, predictably and repeatedly. Her company has helped individuals, teams, and organizations realize their dreams through a combination of courageous leadership, project management excellence, sheer determination, and plain old stubbornness. She has worked with companies of all sizes, including one-person ventures and those in the Fortune 50, and she has helped to launch and grow more than half a dozen startups, a few of which are reaping excellent profits at this very moment. She spends about half of her time working with Japan-based companies that are committed to developing truly global leaders. Kimberly’s leadership workshops are extremely popular with her Japanese clients, who are delighted to find the experience highly interactive, expressive and transformative, a refreshing change of pace from the lecture style typical in many Japanese companies.

Kimberly attributes her scrappiness to being raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and to the sheer luck of genetics—her whole family is seriously scrappy. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) A physicist by education, she earned a master's degree in physics from Case Institute and a bachelor's in chemistry and physics from Wright State University.

Kimberly spent a decade at HP in engineering leadership and product development project management roles. She then spent four years in the wild and whacky world of Silicon Valley start-ups before leading one to a glorious defeat during the dotcom bust of 2001 as the VP of Program Management. (Indeed, the company was purchased by Google, but as luck would have it, for pennies on the dollar... Drat!) Vigorously scrappy, she reemerged from the smoldering remains of the “Silicon Valley Mood Disorder" to launch her own company, consulting worldwide from Tokyo to Armenia, as well as the once-again-vibrant Silicon Valley. Kimberly is the executive editor of The Scrappy GuidesTM, and a regular contributor to ProjectConnections.com. She is also the lead blogger on the UC Santa Cruz Extension's The Art of Project Management Blog. Feel free to contact her at or check out her web site at You can order her book on Amazon at and see the hilarious video of the nearly-true story of the precarious last hurdles that she overcame to get the book published at

Used by Permission on ProjectConnections.com. Permission for Members' use on their projects.

See our Terms of Service for information on PMO/group use and corporate subscriptions.